Getting miles away from Terman: Did the CRPS fund Catharine Cox Miles's unsilenced psychology of sex?

Abstract

Psychologist Catharine Cox Miles (1890-1984) is often remembered as the junior author, with Lewis Terman, of Sex and Personality. Written with support from the Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex (CRPS), Sex and Personality introduced the "masculinity-femininity" personality measure to psychology in 1936. Miles has been overlooked by some historians and constructed as a silent, indirect feminist by others. Private letters show that Terman and Miles had different assumptions about the need for library research work to precede the empirical work for Sex and Personality. Miles's 1935 chapter on the "Social Psychology of Sex" shows that her theoretical formulation of sex differed from Terman's in its emphasis on female embodiment, respect for the emerging tradition of the sex survey, and its opinions about the determinants of marital happiness, and the variability of intelligence. Ironically, CRPS monies wired to Terman may have funded Miles to develop this early formulation of the psychology of sex. © 2011 American Psychological Association.